00:00It's funny I feel that's not very personal those things were kind of like
00:04details along the way and along the process the things that are really
00:07personal in the movie to me are like me talking about basically just the I don't
00:13know discomfort struggles I've had with in male relationships basically in
00:16friend relationships in this case it's a cousin but it can be a friend and just
00:20feeling completely envious of somebody whose life you know is materially and
00:26unsustainably much worse than yours but just this deep feeling of envy and
00:31shame about being the self-conscious you know just this you know the self
00:36conscious constantly questioning anxious person and Kieran for me is kind of like
00:41the you know he's like my id he's like you know the my shadow this guy who is so
00:46comfortable with himself even to the point where he's comfortable talking about his
00:49own grief in a way that feels more earthy and rich than the way I talk about my
00:53own grief and at the same time I know that he has this unsustainable life and
00:57I just can't reconcile these two things this great person and this person who's
01:01been hollowed out and so that stuff is really personal and you know for me I'm
01:05sitting there in the library writing it and I'm like you know crying over
01:08writing it and then I'm acting and it just feels like this almost like cathartic
01:11thing of all the stuff I've been feeling about certain things that I haven't
01:14been able to articulate but that I can through when I'm writing because it feels
01:18like there's this bit of a separation and then acting for me has always been
01:21this really cathartic thing and so for me to get to kind of like bring that to
01:24fruition through performing it felt really cathartic but ultimately
01:29completely unhelpful you know I'm still stuck in those feelings but maybe in
01:33some ways it's it's it's good to exercise it that's interesting and it's a
01:37beautiful scene it really is right thank you Wow what for you was the the scene
01:43there's a scene which is like a kind of a magic realism in the film which is going
01:48from a very realistic documentary kind of film to something that becomes almost
01:52dreamlike towards the end and it was an important scene for me because it was the
01:57one I wrote first which is odd for this movie when you see it so it was kind of
02:03like for me the way I write is that I have I write random scenes which have
02:07nothing to do with each other but just based on these characters and somewhere try
02:11to connect the dots I still haven't gotten over the three act structure problems that I have
02:16I'm struggling I'm with you that shit's hard it's hard so this is like the connecting dots that I like to do and I enjoy that very much it's like and there's so many scenes that you write that don't make it to the film and they just like the juice of it all and it's so fun
02:33but this scene I had from the start which was you know where she where she sort of imagines
02:38her husband and it was really important to me that because it's a story about a woman who is in a
02:45relationship an arranged marriage with a guy who's vanished from her life but that relationship is
02:50seen as something that is acceptable by society and she really kind of looks down on her roommate who is
02:56having an affair with the person who you know the society would never accept because of a difference in
03:01identity and religion and you know she's like this is not legitimate this is not the right way to be
03:07and so for me this disappearing husband didn't really have to come back to tell her anything she needed to
03:15sort of purge this morality out of her life and in that sense I connected a lot with baby girl because
03:23you know our codes of morality and sexuality and desire in different countries are different for women
03:29but it's still the same fundamental struggle and she needed to kind of you know see the light in
03:36in a world where it was all dark for her and that's also where the title comes from and for me the scene
03:42was difficult to do because it kind of is this it could go either way it could completely you know
03:47because it slips into a kind of a fantasy world uh in a very realistic film so I was very afraid of how to
03:55pull this off and I relied a lot on sound design to do it uh a kind of an internal sound design and
04:01I enjoy that very much because cinema gives you those palettes in your I mean the colors in your
04:07palette and one of them is sound and uh yeah I think yeah for me it was a tough scene to to do
04:14the result was magical I thought it was absolutely magical that's so poetic and beautiful and very clear
04:21also in that sense of course very well done yeah Justin from uh either of yours was the one that
04:26was particularly uh daunting uh yeah the ending of challengers um you know because I was pretty
04:37militant throughout the entire process of making the movie that we were never going to this is a
04:42spoiler but yeah that we were never going to declare a winner of the match because for me by the time
04:49they arrive at that final scene all their cards are out on the table and they're having the most
04:55open and honest conversation of their lives all together and they're having it through tennis
04:59and they're all really playing tennis again for the first time in years you know Tashi included
05:04and so for me the match doesn't matter anymore you know the score doesn't matter and I felt like
05:10declaring a winner would uh cheapen that but of course because it's a movie at the scale that it was
05:18made there's pressure from various points to you know this is a sports movie we have to know who
05:22wins if we don't say who wins people are going to leave and give it a bad cinema score or something
05:28you know and um and that that you that pressure was real and I respected it and I got where it was
05:36coming from but I was you know really convinced that that was not the path um so in pre-production
05:44I was finding ways to keep the uh keep the fundamental truth of what I was going for in
05:52that ending while also figuring out a way to make that uh to make it emotionally and sort of viscerally
05:58more satisfying and feel like something had been resolved uh and that's when it sort of dawned on me
06:06one day in the production office that within tennis there was an answer which was that in tennis
06:12sometimes the game itself actually brings the players closer together when there's a volley at
06:17the net and that had not been in the script yet uh this thing of them literally coming closer and
06:23closer together and you know if you think about tennis in relationship to boxing uh you know those
06:32being the two sort of gladiatorial sports where it's one-on-one boxing is all about touching another
06:38person and tennis is all about not touching another person which is why tennis is a game of repression
06:43you know uh and so it felt all of a sudden like that could be a way to have our cake and eat it too
06:52with the ending where finally they touch in the game um so yeah thank you and huge cinema score
06:58yes most importantly cinema score went through
07:02i am now the president of saris
07:07helena uh the the scene for you for me uh there's a scene in my movie where they uh where harris dickinson
07:17who plays samuel uh her intern and nico kidman who plays romey really have their first long meeting
07:22and it's in a i call it the cheap hotel room and the challenge of that whole scene is that for me
07:28they go through a whole marriage within let's say 12 hours and so they had to you know be able to
07:33play all those different things and we build it it was a built set and i wanted nobody in there
07:37except my dp jasper wolf who's a genius uh and them and we put microphones everywhere so that they
07:43could be completely alone uh there's a lot of intimacy in that scene but it's also technically
07:47just very hard to do because what i was looking for is a tone where they kind of go in and out of
07:52their performance that sexuality sometimes is because they're trying out their dynamic so i wanted him
07:56to give her an assignment and then at the same time be like oh sorry i'm so sorry is that okay
08:00am i allowed to say this and that tone i was like how am i gonna write that on the page so that an
08:05actor can read that and actually understands what because that's quite hard so i spent a long time
08:11writing it out so that hopefully the actors would understand and then when we were doing it it was the
08:15final day and i was incredibly nervous but they did such an amazing job and we prepared it very very
08:21intensely so they knew all the choreography and they were just amazing so that in the moment it
08:26could be electrifying and they could even invent new stuff and yeah they're just amazing performance
08:31but i was very nervous wow wow uh jason i think it's really important to my writing process uh which
08:37is at some point in life as a writer you you feel something you feel something and it's really
08:42complicated it's something that gives you joy but heartbreak and loneliness and sadness and
08:48and it's like tasting something you've never tasted before and as a writer you go how am i going to
08:53get an audience to feel that one day and i think the technique that you build over the course of being
08:57a storyteller is figure out a way in an audience to get an audience to feel something really complex
09:02and that's at the end of the day like really all we're after uh on snl uh there was this thing that
09:09i had experienced not only when i was on the floor of saturday night live uh what it felt like right
09:16before it went to air uh which even as an audience member you're scared there's no good reason to be
09:22scared but you are right um and uh and then and you and but i'd also felt that doing the high school
09:29play or like that like a summer camp musical and and it was how is the audience going to really
09:35understand not only that feeling but how this whole group coalesces and and on our film on saturday
09:41night strange it's not a movie with 90 scenes it's a movie with one 90 minute scene the entire
09:47thing connects from the moment you meet lauren all the way to the very end until someone says live from
09:51new york it's saturday night and we knew we were going to meet all these characters and it became a
09:55question of having oddly two scripts we have the script that is the script the producible script which
10:00is uh 100 pages that we we actually numbered backwards the first page was page 100 and then it
10:06what 99 98 97 all the way to the last page um but then there was a second document that had everything
10:13else because we were going to be tracking 30 main characters 80 speaking roles uh we had days where
10:21our production mixer steve morrow had up to 58 mics going simultaneously so many that he had to bring a
10:27second mixing board just to mix everything simultaneously for us the only way to actually get to know these
10:33characters and feel what it's like to really be there is for it to sound like you are really there
10:38and that meant everyone needed dialogue not just the people in the foreground but there needed to be
10:42layers of dialogue as you moved through rooms so that you were tracking individual storylines even when
10:46you didn't think you were tracking them and so the the solution became one in our script it's constant
10:55dual dialogue that's when you have character dialogue left and right and it's not because they're talking
10:59over each other it's because these are simultaneous scenes that are happening even though you were
11:03maybe hearing one versus the other but then also having an additional document that had the storyline
11:08of every other character because in our film we have to know not only where every person is at any given
11:13time where every prop is at any given time where a set piece where the llama is and we need to know
11:19where everything is in the building so that every time someone walks through a hallway up a stairway or get
11:24into an elevator we can keep track of five different storylines simultaneously
11:29that's great so great
11:31so great
11:32um i don't know a scene but the uh the breakthrough i had or the kind of moment i felt as a writer i had
11:40figured something out was very early starting it which was um jay cox had written a script already
11:47that had some great moments in it but as i said was kind of and i think jay had handcuffs on
11:52he was avoiding kind of the stuff between the music and but in going after that stuff
12:01i also realized that i didn't want to do you know a long time ago i co-wrote this movie called girl
12:08interrupted and there's this one scene where angelina jolie's character comes up to winona rider and goes
12:13did you talking about the therapy of the institution she goes did you cough up your secret
12:17secret and winona's character's like what secret and she goes the one that you cough up and confess
12:22and they let you fucking out and it's essentially my own reference to what i think of as the ordinary
12:27people or goodwill hunting structure of movies where you have someone harboring and burying and
12:33there's nothing wrong with it it's classic i did it and walked the line essentially but you have this
12:37thing where and then suddenly somewhere in the third act it comes out and then they're due to
12:44my modern psychoanalytical theory they're essentially healed or passed through to a new
12:49um and and that i knew i couldn't do that for this movie to bob dylan that there was nothing he was
12:56going to vomit in the third act that was going to suddenly make you go so it was in a way similar
13:03to what he was just talking about in terms of saturday night is that i realized and i thought of my
13:09old mentor's movie amadeus peter schaefer's uh script and the and play and and how meticulously
13:16it's a movie about genius in which you don't penetrate the genius nearly as much as you
13:21understand salieri his wife the king and everyone else and the wake they leave on others which in its
13:29own way allows you to understand this other character but you are not you you suddenly don't
13:35have to fulfill this other kind of uh freudian um uh scene that's such a staple and a wonderful one
13:43that i enjoy of cinema but that i knew would work in this particular script if there's one other thing
13:49i could say about the quote you used before about movies need to a script job is to sell or to get made
13:55yeah i didn't mean that in a in a cynical way i meant it in the sense that i was speaking to film
14:03students and and very often when you read young screenwriters scripts including my own they are
14:10extremely aggressive in terms of trying to make sure you see the whole fucking movie right right
14:16and that and oftentimes they're told not to do this because it'll offend the director which is not the
14:24reason not to do it the reason not to do it it's fucking boring to read and that the and that a great
14:31if we're talking about someone a screenwriter could take away there was a great piece of advice i once
14:36received which is to write a script like you're in a theater watching the movie and speaking to a
14:42blind person who couldn't see it so that and if you took too long to describe what was going on you
14:49get way fucking behind so you'd go there's a lot of clouds in a little house and that's all you say
14:53right you don't go it's a cupboard house with a peeling paint on the outside
14:56you'd lose the fucking movie and then you just get out you know a small house in a field right
15:03and you try and write that way and it gives you a sense of the impatience of your reader who will
15:09stop reading after 10 pages of not you bring all your intention bring all the the the detail you see
15:19but you can render that with less words and make the reading because it isn't just a list of
15:25ingredients isn't just a list of dialogue it is something that's going to have to win an actor
15:30it's going to have to win a studio it's going to have to win a crew a dp other people they're going
15:34to have to decide to do your movie and not someone else's so that you can't ignore that the document
15:39is not only a dramatic thing but a persuasive argument for the existence of the dramatic thing at the
15:48same time and that's what I meant
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